


Break, Blow, Burn

by aderyn



Series: Natural Facts [12]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 221B Ficlet, Gen, Post Reichenbach, one crime scene & two 221B's
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-01
Updated: 2012-04-01
Packaged: 2017-11-02 20:31:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/373045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"London in March is a good place to be if you like looking at clouds, and John does. "</p>
<p> The anticipation of grief is not, as some say, worse than the grief itself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Break, Blow, Burn

**Author's Note:**

> A double 221B. Title borrowed from Camille Paglia.

 

**“** _All human beings, like Leda, are caught up moment by moment in the 'white rush' of experience.”—Camille Paglia’s comment on Yeats' poem “Leda and the Swan”, from Break Blow Burn_

 

March in London: The weather’s aggressively mutable, mild and damp in the morning, with a chop on the Thames and gulls screaming into a southwesterly wind; by afternoon the wind shifts into the north and east; the temperature drops, and snow unfurls in spindrifts over the pavement and swarms mothlike around the streetlights, the flakes battering themselves out on John’s face as he and Sherlock duck into a cab.

It won’t last.  By the time they reach Lestrade’s crime scene the flurries have tapered off, but there are still a few glinting on the dark tunic of the girl on the riverbank, her bare feet like marble in the oily mud.  One arm is flung up over her head; her eyes are wide open.  John can see the crystals lingering in her lashes.

The wind knifes through John’s jacket.  Sally Donovan, her wild hair full of flakes, stands watch at the edge of the crime scene.The girl (maybe seventeen, light-eyed, dark-haired) lies at John’s feet.  Behind her, on the river, a swan beatsits wings, stretches its neck, and skims away in a straight line.

_Lost_ , John thinks.

“It wasn’t the boyfriend,” says Sherlock.

John falls asleep on the cab ride home.

He wakes to a run of irregular heartbeats. There’s a dullish ache in the small of his back.

***

In the morning, Lestrade has arrested the young girl’s mother and texted Sherlock in triumph.

Sherlock has a blackened orbital bone and the beginnings of a cold.  He’s dressed half-heartedly: white dress shirt, but with track pants, barefoot, hair wild as a Cotswold sheep’s.

On the way out the door, John leans over the back of the sofa and touches the bruising with the tips of his fingers.

“Another ice pack wouldn’t hurt,” he says, “And you could stay in today.”

He lifts the light throw (something faded and lacy—Mrs. Hudson’s?) off the back of the sofa and drops it over Sherlock as if that will hold him, as if anything will.

London in March is a good place to be if you like looking at clouds, and John does.  He turns his collar up against another one and he glances up at the altostratus and thinks about the girl and the swan beating away.

The anticipation of grief is not, as some say, worse than the grief itself. Soon, when he finds himself crouched, bewildered, in Sherlock’s cupboard, lost among the bespoke suits, lashes crusted with salt, these are some of the things he thinks about:

The first time he called out to Sherlock in desperation. _(I’m here-- where are you?)_

Those white wings, the violence and the beauty.

**Author's Note:**

> Leda and the Swan
> 
> W.B. Yeats
> 
> A sudden blow: the great wings beating still  
> Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed  
> By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,  
> He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
> 
> How can those terrified vague fingers push  
> The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?  
> And how can body, laid in that white rush,  
> But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
> 
> A shudder in the loins engenders there  
> The broken wall, the burning roof and tower  
> And Agamemnon dead.
> 
> Being so caught up,  
> So mastered by the brute blood of the air,  
> Did she put on his knowledge with his power  
> Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?


End file.
